Dropping out Uni

I’ve recently been accepted into London South Bank University and now face the daunting realisation that this is the final chance I have to ever complete higher education. About two years ago I, like everyone else in my college class, completed the necessary forms to go to University, attended open days and finally chose the course and the University I wanted to go to.

LSBU at night!

Except instead of basing my decision solely on the fact that the course was right for me, I  chose to make the highly uninformed decision of chosing the same University that my now ex boyfriend wanted to go to. Blinded by immature lust I readily chose Lincoln University as one of my top choices, predictably however my boyfriend and I broke up and in a panic state I realised it was no longer a decent idea to go to Lincoln after all.

I had no idea what to do, it was May and the closing deadline was fast approaching, could I stay there and just avoid him I thought to myself? That wasn’t going to work either, the campus was small and we’d eventually akwardly bump into each other. Plus a part of me felt that there wasn’t anything there for me in Lincoln, sure it was a nice University and it was accredited by all the right newspapers but it was not much better than the town I wanted to get out of. So in my sheer haste to hit the UCAS deadline I chose my second choice instead. Roehampton University in South West London has one of the most beautiful, breathtaking campuses I had ever seen, it ticked all the right boxes and was marginally more difficult than Lincoln to get into – therefore better, I stupidly assumed

Roehampton Uni, probably one of the nicest campuses I've ever been to.

Months later I was on my way to London in my Dad’s car, but suddenly the journey seemed to be much longer than expected and soon we had passed the bright city lights of Westminster and were now heading past Hammersmith. I hadn’t realised that it was barely in London at all, in fact up until recently it was classed as being in the borough of Surrey. Forgetting that I moved into halls with a bunch of other nervous, first year strangers. At first it was fine, we went out together, got ready together, did everything together. Until the differences between us started to show and conflicts over ridiculous situations arose and then I found myself alone. So very alone. I was 3 hours away from home and living with people who seemed to dislike me, suddenly the idea of University seemed so unglamorous and boring that I would have cut off my own finger to be back home at that very moment. So I weighed up the pro’s and cons, do I stay and spend money living somewhere I don’t like or go home and be deemed as the girl who dropped out of Uni.

I took the second option and two months into my stay I was back in my Dad’s car again leaving. Driving away from the campus and going back home crushed me, I felt so incredibly stupid that I couldn’t have stuck it out longer. The worst part was having to Facebook message my old friends telling them I had left. In general leaving University was a depressing time in my life, for months I fell into a stupour of getting up at 5pm, watching Two and a Half Men for hours then going out with my friends and getting drunk, I did this countless times until the thoughts in my head of being a failure slowly disappeared. Then one day I decided enough was enough, I had left Roehampton for a reason and I had to stop sugar coating the situation in my head. As soon as I realised that everything fell into place as to why I actually left in the first place. I had left because it wasn’t right for me, it wasn’t the right location and it mainly it wasn’t the right course. I had gone to Uni to become a journalist not to study Marxism…

From then on I didn’t feel as bad about being the girl known as the dropout anymore, I started a fresh and in late 2011 I applied for Uni again on the promise that I would never live in halls, be based in central London and I would go to every lecture I had no matter how big the comedown or hangover was. Which takes me back to the beginning, I’ve been accepted into my first choice with an unconditional offer, sweet right? Well I’m also nervous that I’ll make the same mistakes again but I feel like me when I was 18 is very different to me now, I’m almost 20 and I’m way more mature than the stupid girl who went out drinking every night, never showed up to lectures and came home most weekends. I feel like I’m ready to move to a new place and deal with any challenges life throws at me, kind of.